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• What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on March 13, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organization to observe their behavior and interactions up close. The word “ethnography” also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography, other interesting articles.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate  football fans , call center workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyze a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g. a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited timeframe.

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There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs. closed settings, overt vs. covert ethnography, and active vs. passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs. closed settings

The setting of your ethnography—the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action—may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighborhood, or the fans of a particular baseball team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult…
• …but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting…
• …but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organization.

Overt vs. covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent…
• …but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretense for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher…
• …but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs. passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence…
• …but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking…
• …but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organization you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organization allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

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The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions—body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organized (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviors and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded—to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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15 Great Ethnography Examples

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Ethnography is a research method that involves embedding yourself in the environment of a group or community and recording what you observe. It often involves the researcher living in the community being studied. This leads to a much richer understanding of the people being examined than doing quantitative research.

The thing I love about ethnography is that it paints a thorough picture of people’s lives. It is, in its own way, the most raw, honest, and detailed form of academic research.

In my previous blog posts, I have discussed my admiration for thick description as a way to pierce beyond stereotypes and view the world through the lens of our subjects.

And there’s no doubt that ethnographic research has helped us learn so much more about how people navigate their cultural circumstances.

Below are some examples of ethnography – both abstract (with the hope that it helps students think about some ways they can do ethnography) and real-life (with the hope that you will read some inspiring ethnographic studies).

Ethnography Examples

To start, here are some ways you could potentially do ethnography:

• Ethnography of Indigenous People: There are many examples of ethnographic studies that look at indigenous cultures and how they’re similar or different to Western culture. Beware of the trap of colonialism during this work.
• Mundane Ethnography: Remember, ethnography doesn’t have to happen in a far off land. You can do autoethnography where you study yourself , or a study of somewhere very banal, like your workplace or home.
• Educational Ethnography: There is a rich history of teachers and researchers using ethnographic methods in classrooms to explore how learning happens.
• Ethnography in a Shop: Be the ethnographer within a supermarket by interacting with the people there on a daily basis (maybe as the cashier) and observe how people interact and collide within the space.
• Working-Class and Immigrant Ethnography: Many sociologists use ethnographic methods to take an inside look at how people on the margins of society grapple with global concepts like capitalism, globalization, and race.
• Digital Ethnography: Since the rise of the internet, there have been many researchers interested in the digital lives of people. Some of my favorite studies have revealed how we create our identities online.

My Favorite Ethnographic Research Books

1. learning to labour.

Author: Paul Willis

One of my favorite ethnographic works, Learning to Labour follows working-class ‘lads’ in the British Midlands as they participate in counter-cultural and ‘anti-social’ behaviors.

The most fascinating aspect of this book is the rich elucidation of how these working-class boys reject narratives of upward mobility and revel in rejecting mental work at school. But at the same time, they create their own value hierarchies.

In fact, the boys don’t even leave school when they are legally allowed, despite giving a veneer of being anti-school. Instead, they remain there, because there is their own social and even educational value they can get out of it. They prize the manual labor they do in class and, after leaving school, continue to prize physical labor in the workplace while deriding and dismissing mental labor.

2. Being Maori in the City

Author: Natacha Gagné

When indigenous people live in urban environments, their authenticity as indigenous peoples is often brought into question.

Thus, Gagné’s examination of Maori identity in Auckland presents a valuable insight into how people continue to live out their indigenous identities in a changing, urbanized, and colonized landscape.

Gagné spent two years living with Maori people in Auckland and highlights in the book how their identity continues to be central to how they interact both with one another and with broader society.

3. Ethnography of a Neoliberal School

Author: Garth Stahl

While a wide range of academic research has looked at how neoliberalism can affect education, an ethnographic approach allows Stahl to demonstrate how it turns up as lived experience.

Neoliberalism is an approach to governance that focuses on the corporatization of society. In education, this means that schools should be run like companies.

There is no better example, of course, than charter schools .

In my favorite chapter, Stahl demonstrates within one anonymized charter school how teachers are increasingly subjected to performance quotas, KPIs, and governance that narrow down the purpose of education and give them very little freedom to exercise their expertise and provide individualized support to their students.

4. Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead’s groundbreaking ethnography, Coming of Age in Samoa , had implications for two important reasons:

• It highlighted the importance of feminist perspectives in ethnographic research.
• It challenged a universalizing stage-based conceptualization of human development.

Mead’s work was conducted at a time when the Western world was in a moral panic about adolescents’ stress and emotional behaviors. The prevailing idea – promoted mainly by male psychologists – was that most of those behaviors were a natural part of the developmental cycle.

Mead, however, saw that female Samoan adolescents had much different experiences of adolescence and would not have fitted into the western mold of how a female adolescent would behave or be treated.

The Samoan society’s liberal ideas around intimacy and the lower levels of academic stress placed on the girls meant they lived very different realities with far less stress and social pressure than their Western counterparts.

5. Ghetto at the Center of the World

Author: Gordon Mathews

Mathews’s Ghetto at the Center of the World explores a multiethnic high-density housing complex in Hong Kong.

While seen by many locals as a ghetto (despite its relative safety!), Mathews shows how the motley group of residents, migrants, and tourists in the building live rich lives at what appears to be ground zero of globalization.

For the people in the building, globalization has offered opportunities but hasn’t solved all their problems. Each person that Mathews follows has their own story of how they navigate a globalized world while maintaining hope for a better future.

Additional Influential Ethnographic Studies

• Argonauts of the Western Pacific – This study was notable because it presented a turn toward participant observation in ethnography rather than attempts at fly-on-the-wall objectivity.
• The Remembered Village – A study of caste systems in India, this study is most notable for its methodological influence. Srinivas, the author, lost his field notes, but he continued on with presenting his findings, causing widespread controversy about its methodological merits.
• Space and Society in Central Brazil – This study explores the experiences of the Panará indigenous people of Brazil as they attempt to secure protected space from the colonialization occurring around them. It’s notable for its insights into how the Panará people organize themselves both culturally and spatially.
• White Bound – This book follows two groups, a white anti-racist group and a white nationalist group, and explores how each deals with whiteness. While the groups have fundamentally different goals, even the anti-racist group continue to contribute to white privilege .
• City, Street and Citizen – Suzanne Hall’s study of the mundane city street explores how multiethnicity is played out in globalized cities. It is a fascinating look at how lives take place within shared spaces where social contact occurs.

Ethnography is, in my humble (and of course subjective) opinion, the most exciting form of primary research you can do. It can challenge assumptions, unpick social norms, and make us all more empathetic people.

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 10 Reasons you’re Perpetually Single
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 20 Montessori Toddler Bedrooms (Design Inspiration)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 21 Montessori Homeschool Setups
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 101 Hidden Talents Examples

3 thoughts on “15 Great Ethnography Examples”

Thanks very much for that. I am an early childhood teacher, already published on the topic of bilingual and multilingual children in our sector. One of my lecturers has suggested an ethnographic study of some of our immigrant children. Not sure where to start with that, but this has put me in the right frame of mind. Thanks again

Dear Chris,

Any suggested topic on ethnographic research i can start with here in the hospital where i am working. I am a nurse for cardiovascular patients undergoing open heart surgeries.

As you’re in a high risk setting, you might be best asking your managers at the workplace about this one. You could also consider an autoethnography where you do a study on yourself within the settings.

Best of luck with the study.

Regards, Chris

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How to Write An Ethnography

Media Ethnography

The essential components to write an ethnography not an article!

Writing a journal or article is not the same as writing an ethnography. An ethnography is a lengthy written description that brings awareness and creates an understanding of social patterns in a cultural context. Ethnography are utilized by social scientists, such as, anthropologist and sociologist, to present their fieldwork to a larger audience. Although, the works of journalist and social scientist are often compared because they both observe and examine human behaviors and experiences, ethnography are unique in that they can relate their finding to social theories and provide rich content with layers of research.

To write a basic ethnography you need these five essential parts:

A thesis. The thesis establishes the central theme and message of your research study. This will help organize your paper and integrate it around a single major idea. It will also help the reader to identify the importance of the cultural pattern you have studied. It can be one to two sentences longs.

Literature Review. A literature review is an analysis of previous research now on your research topic. This will help you gather background information to enable better understanding of the significance about your research topic. Within your analysis of each article you must examine the topic of study, research methods, research results, strengths and weaknesses, and how your research study will contribute to this research. Depending on the desire length of your ethnography, you should include one to five research articles on your research topic.

Data Collection. The data collection is an explanation of the methods you used to gather your quantitative and/or qualitative data. This will help establish reliability and validity in your research design.

Data Analysis. The data analysis is the interpretation of your data you collected. This will help provide a sense of meaning to your data and relate it to your thesis. In addition, you should provide a social theoretical interpretation of your results. Depending on your data and audience wants, includes graphs of your data.

Reflexivity. Reflexivity is when you discuss your personal reasons for doing research project and what limitations you came across during the research project. This will help eliminate any type of bias the audience may assume about your personal investment in the research study and clear up any misunderstanding in your data. Furthermore, distinguish how your research study contributes to your field of study.

This rubric is based off of my personal experiences conducting social research in my sociology and anthropology college coursework. Your ethnography does not need to written this academically straight forward, but it should includes these components. The ethnography Fado Resounding is a great example of writing creatively about a cultural phenomenon and writing for an audience outside the academic sphere. Fado Resounding “argues for the power of musical genre to sediment, circulate, and transform affect, sonorously rendering history and place as soulful and feeling as public” (Gray, 2013). The researcher, Lila Ellen Gray, displays this argument utilizing qualitative data. The qualitative data Gray presents are interviews, historical analysis, and song lyrics. In addition, throughout the book Gray makes references to other social research that has examine the elements of her research topic. The ethnography contributes to the field of media and communication because it discusses how fado music genre has spread locality, nationality, and international.

After I am done conducting fieldwork on my research topic, I too will be writing an ethnography. My ethnography will be examining the understanding of gentrification and displacement in the particular neighborhood of Station North in Baltimore City, Maryland. At the moment, I am gathering qualitative data through interviews and historical records but I feel in the near future I will need to collect quantitative data to support the claims of my interviewees.

Currently, time feels like my biggest limitation. Time is another factor the separates journals, articles, and ethnography. You need time to gather and transcribe layers of research. To write a detailed ethnography, like Fado Resounding , Gray conducted ten years of research. I sadly only have four months.

Written by Danae Bell

Text to speech

6- Drafting Your Ethnographic Essay

Chapter 6 provides a step-by-step process for developing, writing, and revising your ethnographic research essay.

Finding a Focus, Choosing a Controlling Idea for Your Research

The first step in finding a focus is to read through all of your fieldnotes two times. As you read, notice when and where you become particularly interested in what you have written. Circle, mark or note these passages in some way. Write a brief summary of each idea/passage on a separate sheet. After you identify what interests you most, move on to search for patterns that will lead you to focus.  You can follow the step-by step-process below as a path to create a kind of umbrella or guiding focus statement for your essay:

• Read through the list you compiled from your fieldnotes and identify which parts of your fieldnotes interest and engage you most. Look at the larger arc. Are most of your points taken from your thoughts and feelings or are you more interested in the analysis observation?
• Search for patterns in your list, and make a new list of those patterns. Keep an eye out for things that strike you as meaningful and interesting and that happen again and again.  As you explore patterns, also look for things connected to those patterns.  Find patterns within patterns. how do you connect ideas with language?  Do you seem to repeatedly use the same phrases?  When and with respect to what observations?  This may help identify relevant patters of observation.
• From your list of patterns and connections, select the ONE larger idea/pattern that interests you most. You know you’re on to something if you find a pattern and can see how it connects to other observations you’ve made during your research and /or to what other scholars or writers have said.
• Take that one interesting idea/pattern and develop an “umbrella” statement or a broad focus statement. You can start, for drafting purposes, with something as simple as “In this paper, I will…(discuss, explore, explain, analyze, etc.).”  Here you are articulating the big idea for your essay. You can always return to the statement to make is more sophisticated in the context of a focus paragraph later,
• Expand that statement by breaking the pattern that you are focusing on into any number of supporting observations. Follow your initial broad or umbrella focus statement with that break down. “First, I will….Second…Third….” with each of those statements specifying the supporting material. These first, second, and third statements provide the framework for the body sections of your research essay.

As you examine patterns you find in your own comprehensive observation list and look for an idea, theme, or metaphor to connect them, keep in mind the ways in which a focus moves from observations to a more developed discussion of the ideas you note.  As you connect the dots of your pattern, you may begin to understand where your essay could “land,” which implications become most compelling to you, and which elements for discussion could make clear the complexity of reality and truth.  When you identify some of these more powerful elements, take the time to write about any connections you see between those patterns or expand on any unfinished thoughts. From this list, you need to choose the idea/pattern that interests you most, that you think you can really write about, and that you can support with other observations from your notes. You have found your focus!

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1a- Connecting to Ethnographic Writing
• 1b- Identifying with Ethnographic Writing
• 1c- Rhetorical Strate­gies for Ethnographic Writing
• 2a- Writerly Ethos
• 2b- Under­stand­ing Pla­gia­rism
• 2c- Eth­i­cal Conun­drums in Com­munity Research
• 3a- Examining Culture as Text
• 3b- Selecting a Research Site
• 3c- Access to Your Research Site
• 3d- Rhetorical Strategies for Research Proposals
• 4a- Rhetorical Strategies for Writing Observations
• 4b- Considering Types of Fieldnotes
• 4c- Expanding and Revising Fieldnotes and Observations
• 5a- Searching for Sources: Keywords, Databases, Catalogs, and Shelves
• 5b- Ethical Considerations when Conducting Research of Secondary Sources
• 5c- Impact of Technology on Conducting Research of Secondary Sources
• 5d- Sorting Sources and Eating Books
• 5e- Popular Culture Source Material
• 5f- Summarizing Sources
• 5g- Building an Annotated Bibliography
• 6a- Introducing your Research
• 6b- Presenting the Methodology and Focus
• 6c- Selecting Examples and Evidence
• 6d- Selecting Effective Secondary Source Evidence
• 6e- Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Documenting Source Material
• 6f- Concluding in a Meaningful Way
• 6g- Reviewing and Revising Your Essay
• Supplemental Modules
• How to Use this Textbook
• Teaching with EC
• How to Become a Contributing Author

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• Knowledge Base
• Methodology
• What Is Ethnography? | Meaning, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Meaning, Guide & Examples

Published on 6 May 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on 6 April 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organisation to observe their behaviour and interactions up close. The word ‘ethnography’ also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate football fans , call centre workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyse a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g., a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited time frame.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs closed settings, overt vs covert ethnography, and active vs passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs closed settings

The setting of your ethnography – the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action – may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighbourhood, or the fans of a particular football team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult …
• … but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting …
• … but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organisation.

Overt vs covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent …
• … but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretence for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher …
• … but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence …
• … but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking …
• … but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organisation you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organisation allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions – body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organised (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviours and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded – to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

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What is Ethnographic Research? Methods and Examples

Ethnographic research , rooted in the discipline of anthropology, is a systematic and immersive approach for the study of individual cultures. Ethnographic research methods involve the examination of cultural phenomena from the perspective of the subjects under investigation. This method of social research places a particular emphasis on participant observation, where researchers engage with the setting or individuals being studied, documenting intricate patterns of social interaction and analyzing the participants’ own interpretations of their behavior within their local contexts.   

While ethnography originated in social and cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century, its application has extended to various disciplines. Widely adopted as a qualitative data collection strategy, ethnographic research design stands out for its reliance on observing life as it naturally unfolds, dispensing with the controlled environment of a laboratory. Ethnographic observation seeks to understand societies and individuals through direct observation and interviews, providing valuable insights into how they interact with their surroundings in their natural environments.  

Here are some ethnographic research examples :  

• An anthropologist observing the people and culture of an Indigenous tribe by living with them for several months.  
• A child psychologist observing the social dynamics of toddlers in a play school (interactions with teachers and with one another).   
• A potential startup looking to create a product and a market for that product by observing how a group of potential customers interact with and discuss similar products in various stores over a specified length of time.

Table of Contents

What is ethnographic research ?  

Ethnographic research systematically studies cultures and behaviors, relying on participant observation and exploring cultural phenomena from the perspective of the subjects. Its versatility and qualitative nature make it a valuable data collection strategy in the social and behavioral research sciences. It has transcended disciplinary boundaries, making its way into various social science disciplines, notably sociology. Some key points to better understand what is ethnographic research ? and what are the advantages of ethnography research ? are as follows:  

• Ethnographic research is an immersive approach that aims to document detailed patterns of social interaction and behavior.   
• Ethnographic observation provides a rich source of qualitative data.  
• Ethnographic research methods acknowledge the unpredictability of real-world situations, offering a more authentic understanding of societal dynamics and individual behaviors.  
• Ethnographic research puts the point of view of the subject of the research first.  

Main aim of ethnographic research  

The main aim of ethnographic research is to deep dive into the perspectives and actions of subjects, capturing the variables that characterize their daily experiences. It offers researchers a comprehensive understanding of how subjects perceive the world and navigate their interactions with the surrounding elements.    

Types of ethnographic research  

Ethnographic observation might be applied in fields of business, medicine, education, psychology, and more. There are various types of ethnographic research , broadly based on the study discipline and the activity under study, with each shedding light on human behavior, experiences, and cultural nuances.  

Below are different types of ethnographic research , which will give you a broad idea about how to conduct ethnographic research in various fields:  

1. Psychology ethnography

To explore human experiences and behaviors within a cultural context, researchers immerse themselves in the natural habitat of individuals, applying ethnographic research methods such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, and field notes. 

2. Life history ethnography

Life history ethnography looks at the tapestry of an individual’s life, offering a nuanced understanding of their experiences, challenges, and cultural influences. Researchers conduct in-depth interviews, collect personal documents, and may even observe the subject in their daily life to capture a comprehensive life narrative. By zooming in on a single life, researchers can uncover patterns, transitions, and unique perspectives that might be overlooked in broader ethnographic studies.  

3. Business ethnography

In business and retail, ethnographic research focuses on consumer habits and target markets to discern market demands and attitudes toward products or services. Fieldwork, interviews, and online surveys are used to identify preferences and meet market demands effectively.   

4. Educational ethnography

Researchers employing educational ethnography observe students’ learning attitudes and motivations using non-participant and direct participant observation.  

5. Medical ethnography

In medicine and healthcare, ethnographic research involves qualitative exploration of patient behavior across various healthcare scenarios to understand patient needs, reactions to prescriptions and treatment procedures, suggestions for improvement, etc.  

6. Digital ethnography

Digital ethnography or desk study is conducted remotely. Researchers rely on second- or third-hand information collected by others to compile knowledge about a particular ethnic group without direct observation. This method leverages the wealth of information available online.   

7. Literary ethnography

Novels and books, often overlooked in traditional ethnographic discussions, offer a unique avenue for cultural exploration. Literary ethnography involves analyzing fictional works, autobiographies, and cultural narratives to extract insights into societal norms, values, and historical contexts. This method recognizes the power of storytelling as a medium through which cultural knowledge is transmitted.   

Methods of ethnographic research    

Various methodologies are employed in ethnography, from direct observation, diary studies, video recordings and photography to the analysis of devices used by individuals. The duration of ethnographic studies varies, with observation periods ranging from a few hours to several months, depending on the specific research objectives. Thus, ethnographic research methods employed will depend on the field, the size of the sample, and the research goal.    

So, what are ethnographic methods employed by researchers to answer questions in diverse disciplines? Let’s take a look:  

1. Triangulation  

A researcher used multiple data collection strategies and data sources to obtain a complete picture of the topic in focus and to cross-check information.  

2. Field notes  

A researcher collects, records, and compiles notes on-site during the study. This can be considered a researcher’s primary tool to collect data.  

3. Naturalism  

This is probably the oldest ethnographic research method . In this ethnographic research design , one spends time in the group’s natural environment to observe and record research variables.   

4. Participant observation  

Similar to the above approach, in participant observation, the ethnographer actively interacts with the research subjects. The difference lies in the ethnographer participating in the group. Participant observation gives ethnographers more data. They better understand the research subjects’ experiences and habits from the participant’s perspective.  

5. Interviews  

For authentic and relevant research results, the ethnographer interacts with the research group, asking questions about the research group, while conducting research-related activities.  

6. Surveys  

Ethnography surveys help the researcher obtain and analyze data to arrive at objective conclusions. Multiple choice questions, Likert scale, open-ended, and close-ended ethnography survey questions are commonly used. This approach saves time and costs.   

7. Archival research  

This qualitative ethnographic research method examines existing literature and records of relevant research rather than by the researcher’s physical presence.   

Examples of ethnographic research  

To better understand ethnographic research meaning , methods, and design, let’s take a look at some ethnographic research examples :  

Observing urban street performers: Over the course of several months, a researcher observes urban street performers’ performances and their interactions with passersby, exploring how these individuals collaborate or compete with one another for attention and recognition.  

Studying patterns of coffee shop regulars: Through a combination of direct observation and casual conversations, a researcher might uncover the habits and interactions of regular patrons and the social dynamics that characterize the daily lives of individuals who frequent the establishment.   

Exploring online gaming communities: In the realm of virtual spaces, a researcher might examine online gaming communities to understand the social structures, communication patterns, and shared norms among players. Through active participation and observation within the gaming environment, the researcher might seek insights into how relationships form, conflicts are resolved, and cultural practices evolve within this digital subculture.  

Observing farmers’ market vendors: At a local farmers’ market, a researcher may closely examine the interactions between vendors, customers, and the broader community. This study aims to uncover the cultural nuances of the market environment, exploring aspects such as negotiation tactics, vendor-customer relationships, and the role of the market in creating a sense of community.  

Advantages of ethnography research  

The advantages of ethnography research are manifold. Ethnographic observation allows first-hand observation of subjects’ interactions in their natural environment. This might help uncover subjects’ unconscious or implicit behaviors. Ethnographic research also enables a researcher to gain longitudinal insights as ethnography often involves extended periods of fieldwork, allowing researchers to observe changes and developments over time. Further, this approach often captures the holistic nature of social phenomena by considering various interconnected elements within a cultural context. This holistic approach is beneficial for understanding complex social structures, rituals, and the interplay of different factors influencing behaviors.  

Finally, ethnographic research involves a variety of data collection methods, and this multi-faceted approach yields rich and diverse data, enhancing the depth and validity of the research findings.  

Disadvantages of ethnography research  

Despite its relevance to certain studies, ethnographic research is not without its limitations. One significant challenge lies in the necessity to establish and sustain intimate face-to-face interactions with participants, a task that can prove difficult depending on the study’s nature and the type of participants involved. Prolonged fieldwork might prove costly in terms of time and resources. Second, culture, being an abstract concept, poses difficulties when used as an interpretive lens. Third, ethnographic research lacks reliability and validity since it cannot be easily replicated, and its findings may not extend to other similar situations    

Frequently asked questions  

Q: What are some examples of ethnographic research?

A: Some ethnographic research examples are as follows:  

• Studying yoga retreat participants: An ethnographer may immerse themselves in the experience of a yoga retreat, observing the behaviors, rituals, and social dynamics among participants. This research involves both active participation in yoga sessions and passive observation of communal activities, providing insights into how individuals connect, form bonds, and integrate spiritual practices into their daily lives.  
• Life history ethnography: An in-depth interview of a stroke survivor to obtain an account of their personal struggle for recovery, followed by a narrative analysis based on the transcription, coding, and analysis of transcripts from hours of interviews.  
• Field study on a remote island: A researcher visits a remote island inhabited by an obscure tribe. The researcher then lives and spends a significant amount of time getting to know their daily life customs and practices.  
• Surveying nurses in a trauma hospital: A researcher conducts in-depth surveys to understand the psychological effects of working late-night shifts and dealing with patients with severe trauma.  

Q: What is the main aim of ethnographic research ?

A: The main aim of ethnography is to remain objective and to collect and report what the researcher observes to add to the body of knowledge about the group. It is not to make judgments about the group’s characteristics or methods of interaction or devise approaches to improve or change the group.

Q: Can ethnography be applied to various fields?  

A: Yes, ethnographic research is versatile and can be applied across various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, marketing, design, education, healthcare, and more. Its adaptability makes it a valuable method for gaining insights into diverse aspects of human behavior and culture.    

Q: Is ethnography only suitable for studying small or isolated communities?  

A: No, while ethnography is often associated with studying small or isolated communities, it can also be applied to larger populations and urban settings. The focus is on understanding the cultural context and social dynamics, regardless of the size or location of the community.  

Q: Can the findings from ethnographic research be generalized to broader populations?  

A: Ethnographic observation is often more concerned with depth than breadth, so generalizability to larger populations may be limited. However, the insights gained can inform broader theories and provide a foundation for further research in similar contexts.  

Q: How should researchers ensure ethical conduct in ethnographic research?  

A: Ethnographers must prioritize ethical considerations by obtaining informed consent from participants, maintaining confidentiality, and being transparent about the research purpose. They also navigate potential conflicts of interest and consider the impact of their presence on the community being studied.  

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ethnography , descriptive study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of his study.

There has been some confusion regarding the terms ethnography and ethnology . The latter, a term more widely used in Europe, encompasses the analytical and comparative study of cultures in general, which in American usage is the academic field known as cultural anthropology (in British usage, social anthropology). Increasingly, however, the distinction between the two is coming to be seen as existing more in theory than in fact. Ethnography, by virtue of its intersubjective nature, is necessarily comparative. Given that the anthropologist in the field necessarily retains certain cultural biases, his observations and descriptions must, to a certain degree, be comparative. Thus the formulating of generalizations about culture and the drawing of comparisons inevitably become components of ethnography.

The description of other ways of life is an activity with roots in ancient times. Herodotus , the Greek traveler and historian of the 5th century bc , wrote of some 50 different peoples he encountered or heard of, remarking on their laws, social customs, religion, and appearance. Beginning with the age of exploration and continuing into the early 20th century, detailed accounts of non-European peoples were rendered by European traders, missionaries, and, later, colonial administrators. The reliability of such accounts varies considerably, as the Europeans often misunderstood what they saw or had a vested interest in portraying their subjects less than objectively.

Modern anthropologists usually identify the establishment of ethnography as a professional field with the pioneering work of both the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia ( c. 1915) and the American anthropologist Margaret Mead , whose first fieldwork was in Samoa (1925). Ethnographic fieldwork has since become a sort of rite of passage into the profession of cultural anthropology. Many ethnographers reside in the field for a year or more, learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible, participating in everyday life while at the same time maintaining an observer’s objective detachment. This method, called participant-observation, while necessary and useful for gaining a thorough understanding of a foreign culture, is in practice quite difficult. Just as the anthropologist brings to the situation certain inherent , if unconscious, cultural biases, so also is he influenced by the subject of his study. While there are cases of ethnographers who felt alienated or even repelled by the culture they entered, many—perhaps most—have come to identify closely with “their people,” a factor that affects their objectivity. In addition to the technique of participant-observation, the contemporary ethnographer usually selects and cultivates close relationships with individuals, known as informants, who can provide specific information on ritual, kinship , or other significant aspects of cultural life. In this process also the anthropologist risks the danger of biased viewpoints, as those who most willingly act as informants frequently are individuals who are marginal to the group and who, for ulterior motives ( e.g., alienation from the group or a desire to be singled out as special by the foreigner), may provide other than objective explanations of cultural and social phenomena. A final hazard inherent in ethnographic fieldwork is the ever-present possibility of cultural change produced by or resulting from the ethnographer’s presence in the group.

Contemporary ethnographies usually adhere to a community , rather than individual, focus and concentrate on the description of current circumstances rather than historical events. Traditionally, commonalities among members of the group have been emphasized, though recent ethnography has begun to reflect an interest in the importance of variation within cultural systems. Ethnographic studies are no longer restricted to small primitive societies but may also focus on such social units as urban ghettos. The tools of the ethnographer have changed radically since Malinowski’s time. While detailed notes are still a mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers have taken full advantage of technological developments such as motion pictures and tape recorders to augment their written accounts.

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130 Ethnographic Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Ethnographic research is a method used by anthropologists and sociologists to study and understand different cultures and societies. This type of research involves immersing oneself in the culture being studied, participating in everyday activities, and observing social interactions. Ethnographic essays are written based on this research, providing a detailed and in-depth analysis of a particular culture or community. If you are looking for inspiration for your ethnographic essay, here are 130 topic ideas and examples to consider:

• The impact of globalization on a remote indigenous community
• Gender roles in a traditional African tribe
• Rituals and ceremonies in a Mexican village
• Youth culture in urban Japan
• Food traditions in a Middle Eastern country
• Religious practices in a Hindu temple
• Family dynamics in a Hispanic immigrant community
• Education system in a rural African village
• Healthcare practices in a Native American tribe
• Social hierarchy in a Southeast Asian society
• Dating and courtship rituals in a European country
• Art and music in a Caribbean island
• Traditional healing methods in an Aboriginal community
• Political activism in a South American country
• LGBTQ+ rights in a Middle Eastern society
• Indigenous land rights in Australia
• Community festivals in a European city
• Language preservation in an African tribe
• Traditional crafts in a Southeast Asian village
• Environmental conservation practices in a Pacific island
• Indigenous storytelling traditions in North America
• Street food culture in a South Asian city
• Marriage customs in a Middle Eastern country
• Urban migration in a Latin American city
• Traditional dance forms in an African country
• Social media use in a Western society
• Traditional clothing in a South Asian culture
• Teenage subcultures in a European city
• Aging population in a developed country
• Indigenous governance in a Pacific island nation
• Homelessness in a North American city
• Gender equality in a Scandinavian country
• Cultural assimilation in an immigrant community
• Folklore and mythology in an Asian country
• Climate change adaptation in a coastal community
• Music festivals in a Western country
• Indigenous resistance movements in a Latin American country
• Traditional farming practices in an African village
• Youth activism in a Southeast Asian society
• Cultural appropriation in a Western society
• Traditional medicine in an Asian country
• Community policing in a Caribbean island
• Dance clubs in a European city
• Gender identity in a South American culture
• Traditional architecture in a Middle Eastern city
• Street art in a North American city
• Indigenous languages in a Pacific island nation
• Social welfare programs in a Scandinavian country
• Refugee integration in a European country
• Youth unemployment in a developing country
• Indigenous art forms in an African tribe
• LGBTQ+ representation in a South Asian society
• Urban planning in a Middle Eastern city
• Environmental activism in a Pacific island nation
• Indigenous rights movements in Australia
• Traditional music in a Caribbean island
• Social media influencers in a Western society
• Traditional healing practices in an Asian country
• Community gardens in a Latin American city
• Gender-based violence in a Southeast Asian society
• Cultural heritage preservation in a European city
• Traditional clothing in a North American indigenous community
• Peer pressure in a Western high school
• Indigenous storytelling traditions in a Pacific island nation
• Urban gentrification in a Scandinavian city
• Refugee camps in a Middle Eastern country
• Indigenous land disputes in a South American country
• Traditional dance forms in an African village
• Social media activism in a Western society
• Gender roles in a South Asian family
• Traditional crafts in a Caribbean island
• Cultural diversity in a European city
• Youth empowerment programs in a Latin American country
• Indigenous education initiatives in Australia
• Traditional music in a Southeast Asian village
• Gender equality in a Pacific island nation
• Community policing in a North American city
• LGBTQ+ representation in a Scandinavian society
• Traditional medicine in an African tribe
• Climate change adaptation in a South American community
• Music festivals in a Middle Eastern country
• Indigenous resistance movements in an Asian country
• Traditional farming practices in a Pacific island nation
• Youth activism in a European city
• Cultural assimilation in a North American immigrant community
• Folklore and mythology in a South Asian culture
• Street food culture in a Latin American city
• Marriage customs in a Caribbean island
• Indigenous governance in a Western society
• Homelessness in an African village
• Gender equality in a Southeast Asian

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89 Ethnographic Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best ethnographic topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 interesting topics to write about ethnographic, 👍 good essay topics on ethnographic, ❓ ethnographic research questions.

Ethnographic essays are an excellent way to show your understanding of the science and the relationships that form a particular development or situation. You have to display your knowledge of anthropology and how it influences a particular population group based on a variety of circumstances.

There are many factors that can affect a group of people, including their geographic location, climate, relationships with other groups, numbers, and more. As such, compiling them to form a logical conclusion can be an overwhelming task.

The complex relationships between different variables may appear relevant when they are not and vice versa. However, there are several tips that will let you write an outstanding essay.

You should try to determine the root causes behind the formation of a particular culture or phenomenon and work outwards from them. For example, overpopulation does not generally occur without a definite reason, as human populations tend to regulate themselves.

Once you identify that it is present, search for causes such as immigration, poverty, or sudden removal of a threat. After you identify the reason, you can mention it in your essay before overpopulation and use the two to develop a logical argument.

In doing so, you will establish a link and introduce a structure to your essay. The relationships may even provide you with ethnographic essay ideas that you may explore in detail.

Here are some tips for your writing process:

• Write a clear and concise thesis that will describe the topic of your essay and include it at the end of the introduction. It will help the reader understand what you are discussing early on and evaluate your arguments.
• Try to focus on one specific option among different ethnographic essay topics and have every point you make support it. The goal of the essay is to defend ideas, and deviations into unrelated matters serve as distractions. The reader will not appreciate a deviation from the subject matter into unknown territory.
• Separate the body of your essay into sections with concise and descriptive titles. A structure that divides the paper by topics makes navigation easier in case the reader wants to revisit your essay later.
• Remember that you are writing about ethnography, the study of cultures. While it may be tempting to concentrate on the circumstances of a specific group, your goal is to explain its practices and traditions. As such, you have to provide concrete examples of how a behavior emerged to suit the population’s needs.
• Make sure to cite relevant scholarly research whenever you want to make a statement of fact. Today’s science is founded on the achievements of past researchers, and their findings should not be taken as universal truths.

These considerations will help you improve your essay while you write it, reducing the workload and letting you achieve better results. The paper you will produce by following the tips will be easy to read and comprehend and show your understanding of the topic.

It will also demonstrate that you have studied the relevant sources and obtained accurate data for the formation of your conclusions.

However, you may struggle to write an essay from nothing using just these suggestions, as they require that you have some notion of the ideas you will discuss. For inspiration, visit IvyPanda to find ethnographic essay examples and other useful paper samples!

• Ethnographic and Phenomenological Approaches to Research Ethnographic research is an approach to data collection and analysis that aims at evaluating and categorizing human experiences through the lens of the participants’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
• Ethnographic Research Methods Participant observation can be defined as a qualitative method in ethnology research that is used by researchers in the areas of cultural anthropology in which the researcher in given the opportunity to get a close […]
• Ethnographic Design: Characteristics According to Abalos, “ethnography is the in depth study of naturally occurring behavior within a culture or a social group; it seeks to understand the relationship between culture and behavior, with culture referring to beliefs, […]
• A Critical Review of Ethnographic Analysis The difference between these two techniques is transparent: in the case of open observation, the group of respondents knows that the researcher is conducting an analysis and is aware of its goals, whereas covert observation […]
• Barker’s Ethnographic Exposé: Revealing Structural Violence Against the Marshallese Barker’s study of the Marshallese people and their victimization by the U.S.government is an outstanding demonstration of how ethnographic research and writing should be conducted.
• Ethnographic Design: Types The investigator is required to define the characteristics of the society under study. Abalos, argues that “critical ethnographic studies are a type of ethnographic research in which the author is interested in advocating for the […]
• Clement Restaurant: Ethnographic Description The ethnographic analysis will be added with a demographic review of the region in order to identify whether the business success is stipulated by the ethnographic background of the restaurants, or the population that is […]
• Ethnographic Prospects in Teaching and Learning Such a controversial view on the approaches taken in the research complies with the changeability of the social life at the moment.
• Ethnographic Interview of the Costa Rican People The analysis of the social environment is the important aspect of realizing the cultural background and the social problems of the clients.
• Tourism Management as an Ethnographic Theme Thus, as it is stated in some of the interview, tourists generally expect the attitude of obeisance towards them, and the workers of the tourism sphere feel themselves as the obedient servants.
• Hong Kong Street Food in Ethnographic Studies Bronislaw Malinowski is often cited as one of the first practitioners of this method during his research of the people of Papua New Guinea.
• Mayan Culture in Ethnographic Interpretation The Mayan elders were charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the traditions of the people and overseeing all the cultural practices.
• The Kurds Culture: An Ethnographic Study The most popular of the two dialects is the Kurmanji, it is the language of communication for most of the Kurds today.
• Mesoamerican Ethnographic Interpretation The civilization of these people faced strong influences from the people in the non-Maya cultures which include the Olmecs of Mexico and the Izapa cultures of people who lived in the Pacific coast.
• Mayan Ethnographic Interpretation: Traditions and Rituals According to The Mayan culture, the human body was viewed as a combination of the body and the souls. This means that the blood could communicate to the inner and the outer environment of the […]
• Navajo Ethnographic and Ethnological Studies The story is preserved in myths and is recounted in the ceremony known as ‘blessing way’ which is the foundation of the Navajo way of life.
• Ethnographic State in India He stated that their ignorance of the customs and beliefs of the Indian people had a hit against the British and that this had resulted to a distant loss of administrative power to British government.
• Cheyenne Indians History and Culture Furthermore, it was to emphasize the unique powers and the superiority of the chief priests and the prophets in the community.
• The Significance of Ethnographic Observation Thus, Arthur concentrates on the role of women in the use of lithics and the role of females in the development of Prehistoric communities, whereas Sillitoe and Hardy study the use of stone tools and […]
• Ethnographic Research: Coming of Age in Samoa Considering Margaret Mead’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Samoa, it is possible to say that dwelling upon that society she paid much attention to religion, education, upbringing and relation to each other within a family, […]
• Ethnographic Field Notes from Starbucks The two large supermarkets, the large pharmacy, the three playgrounds, the community garden, the eclectic shopping and night life of South Street itself, the mural art of Isaiah Zagar, and other attractions, all pull a […]
• Ethnographic reflection Mixing the scientific and humanistic approaches and implementing the anthropological framework and the concept of the bio-cultural triad for covering various sides of life of Beaver community, Brody uses dialogic procedures for depicting and explaining […]
• Twin Oaks Intentional Community Ethnographic Analysis It was through field work that the community was noted as one of the intentional communities. One of the main lessons learnt was their effort to bring gender equality in the community.
• Understanding the Science of Ethnographic Through Oneirology
• An Overview of the Dream State and the Concept of Human Ethnographic
• Understanding the Unconcious Ethnographic
• The Beauty Of Ethnographic: How Dreams Drive The Individual
• The Skeptical Ethnographic Argument of Rene Descartes, and the Priori and the Posteriori
• Ethnographic And Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• An Overview of the Controversy of Ethnographics, a Cognitive Activity During Sleep
• Animal Ethnographic And Substantiation A Connection To Humanity
• The Psychological Theories Of The Function Of Ethnographic
• The Ethnographic and Traditional Aboriginal Spirituality
• Sleeping and Ethnographic and Theories of Sleep
• Ethnographic Is Known As The Journey Your Mind
• The Centrality of the Ethnographic and Its Importance for Aboriginal Spirituality
• The Benefits Of Lucid Ethnographic
• Procrastination and Day Ethnographic
• Comparing and Contrasting Psychological Theories of Ethnographic
• Ethnographic as a Significant Process in Human Life Experience
• The Use of Illusion Argument, Ethnographic Argument, and Evil Genius Argument by Descartes
• Varieties of Lucid Ethnographic Experience, by Stephen Laberge
• Day Ethnographic in the Middle of the Summer Heat
• Ethnographic Various Amount Of People Experiences Different Effects
• Dreams, Ethnographic and Phases of Sleep
• Freud’s Theory of Ethnographic and Repression
• Synchroncities in the History of Paranormal Ethnographic
• Dreams and Ethnographic Nightmares in Children
• Gender And Ethnographic in Mapuche Shamanistic Practices
• Phenomenology of Ethnographic
• Descartes’ Meditations: Ethnographic and Evil Demon Arguments
• How Is the Power of Dreams and Ethnographic in the Novel of Mice and Men
• Difference Between Astral Projection And Lucid Ethnographic
• The Significance of Land to the Ethnographic for Aboriginal People and the Impact of the Land Rights Movement
• The Importance of Ethnographic and Sleeping
• Ethnographics Can Bring Misery in the Great Gatsby By F. Scott
• Exploring Causes of Sleep Difficulty and Ethnographic Problems
• The Importance of Ethnographic and the Sub-Conscious
• What Are the Problems and Constraints of Making Films on Ethnographics?
• What Importance May the Sex of the Anthropologist Have on the Ethnographic Process?
• What Does Ethnography Mean?
• What Is an Ethnographic Example?
• What Is Considered Ethnographic?
• What Is Ethnography Used For?
• What Is the Difference Between Ethnography and Anthropology?
• Why Is Ethnography Critical in Research?
• What Is Ethnography in Sociology?
• What Is Ethnography in Social Research?
• What Kind of Research Is Ethnography?
• What Is a Synonym for Ethnography?
• Is Ethnography a Research Design?
• How Do You Use Ethnography in a Sentence?
• When Did Ethnology Appear?
• How Does Ethnography Work in Real Life?
• What Are the Critical Characteristics of Ethnography?
• What Is the Difference Between Phenomenology and Ethnography?
• Who Was the First Ethnographer?
• Who Is the Father of Ethnography?
• How Do Ethnologists Study Culture?
• What Is the Difference Between Archaeology and Ethnography?
• What Is the Ethnological Argument?
• Is Ethnography a Theory?
• What Is the Weakness of Ethnography?
• What Is the Difference Between Ethnography and Qualitative Research?
• What Are the Problems With Traditional Ethnographic Film-Making?
• What Is the Relationship Between Students and Teachers in Ethnographic?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Ethnographic Reflexivity?
• What Are the Defining Activities and Principles of Ethnographic Research?
• Intercultural Communication Questions
• Social Change Topics
• Cultural Relativism Questions
• Stereotype Topics
• Eugenics Questions
• Organizational Behavior Research Topics
• Demographics Topics
• Sociological Perspectives Titles
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Encyclopedia for Writers

Writing with artificial intelligence, ethnography.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - Professor of English - USF

Table of Contents

Ethnography involves studying a specific culture or community. By living among the members of a culture and playing the role of participant-observer, ethnographers attempt to define the beliefs, rituals, symbols, problems, and patterns of behavior that distinguish this culture from other dominant cultures.

The purpose of ethnography is not to generalize from a smaller population to a larger one. Instead, ethnographers are conducted to better understand specific groups and how those people are influenced by their environment. While ethnographers typically interview key informants in the culture, their emphasis in writing an ethnography is not to tell discrete life stories. Instead, ethnographers use their observations, conclusions from informal and formal interviews, results of psychological tests, and interpretations of insider-written documents to weave together an account of key people in the community and to explicate the community’s values, ceremonies, problems, and prospects.

Ethnography in the Classroom

In a variety of college classes, your instructors may challenge you to play the exciting role of an ethnographer. For example, in a sociology class you may be asked to observe and analyze behavior in a college dormitory. For an education class you may need to analyze how different sociological backgrounds or teaching techniques affect learning. Instructors in business management or communication classes might ask you to study the interpersonal factors that influence how decisions are made or how different people respond to certain leadership and management styles. 

An important aspect of ethnography involves the types of questions that a researcher tries to answer. Some ethnographers begin their research with a central question that guides their exploration. Others prefer to find their research question after they’ve been in the community for a while, or even after they’ve left the community. An ethnographic approach can be particularly appropriate for short-term projects like the ones assigned in a relatively brief college courses. Even though some professional ethnographies last for years, studies with a limited scope can be conducted in a matter of weeks.

Selecting a Culture

The athlete’s gym, the women’s club, the student government committee, the hair salon, the yoga class, the children’s play group, the news room—all of these unique communities could provide fascinating sites for ethnographic analysis. Other easily identifiable and accessible groups include the members of a dormitory, a particular classroom, a study group, an intramural athletic team, fellow employees, or even graduate students. Of course, you want to exercise caution when selecting a community to study; avoid potentially dangerous communities.

New Communities Are Better Than Familiar Ones

Experts disagree about how involved you can be in a community before studying it by means of ethnographic methods. Because you are experimenting for the first time with these methods, your instructor may allow you to study a community to which you already belong. The problem, however, with studying such a community is that you are less able to be passive and objective when you gather data. In a sense, what you think about the community and the people in it may control what you perceive. Rather than trying to discover why and how people behave as they do, your membership and history with the culture may blind you to new insights. Instead of going into a community with an open mind and systematically examining behavior, you may end up merely writing what you already believe, which undercuts our current goal—that is, to conduct research. If time limitations prohibit you from studying a new community, therefore, you will need to pay special attention to triangulating your data, as discussed below.

You also want to be realistic about how much you can accomplish in a short period of time. Remember, if performed diligently, ethnography creates mountains of data. However, many researchers prefer to select from a wealth of material than try to patch a report together based upon a handful of facts and a collection of disjointed photocopies.

Helpful Questions to Narrow the Scope

Asking the following questions can help you narrow the scope of your research.

• What specific culture or community will you study? Why is the culture worth studying? What religious, economic, or political forces define the culture? How would you describe the environment of the culture? What relationships can you define between the culture you are studying and the dominant culture?
• What literature about the culture is available? Do you know any people who used to be members of the culture whom you could interview to help develop a sense of what to look for once you enter the community?
• Do you have a viable way of entering the culture?
• Do you have access to inside written documents — such as interoffice memorandum, research studies, or general essays—that can provide you with information about program goals, problems, and power relations?
• What methods will you use to gather facts? Will you, for example, use any questionnaires, interviews, psychological tests?
• What schedule do you plan to follow? How much time do you allow for data collection or for data interpretation? When will you have a rough draft complete?

Learn About the Culture

Enhance your interpretive skills by learning about the culture before visiting, perhaps by reading other researchers’ ethnographic accounts of the culture. Ethnographers vehemently disagree about the degree to which library research must support field study. Many well-respected anthropologists have written ethnographies that contain few if any references to secondary sources. The job of entering a culture, living as an insider, and then writing to outsiders is already so demanding that they do not have the time, energy, or zeal to connect their work to the work of others. In addition, because ethnography is a fairly new methodology, many ethnographers are truly breaking new ground and other scholarly references may simply be unavailable.

Research the Community First

Familiarizing yourself with the culture before entering it can provide you with the information you need to know to participate without being too obtrusive. For example, if you are going to study the local chess club, you need to learn the rules of chess and play a few games. If you want to study an engineering fraternity, you need to learn the engineering terms that people in the community will use. By learning the language and by knowing what other ethnographers and researchers have to say about the culture, you will know what questions to ask, what behaviors to look for, and even how to dress. For example, if you wanted to research how cancer patients interact with each other in a support group, spend some time in the library reading about how people typically respond to potentially terminal diseases. You would be wise to see if any case studies or ethnographies have already been done with cancer patients. Adequate preparation for your entrance into the community is crucial if you are to blend into the background and subsequently understand the values, expectations, roles, and ceremonies of the community. Conducting extensive library research before entering the community will help you understand the subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions.

To see whether any ethnographies have been conducted on the culture you have selected to study and to find some useful background information about its history and the problems it now faces, you may need to engage in some serious information literacy.

Arrange Access

Secure access to the community without poisoning the waters..

Experts typically agree that the way you are introduced into the community plays a crucial role in the overall success of your study. If the people in charge introduce you to the community and ask participants to do what they can to help you, you may be perceived as a spy or enemy. It is, therefore, often better to enter a community less obtrusively. Because being introduced to the community by someone in power or by someone considered to be a member of an “opposing faction” can irreparably taint your results, you may have to reject the role implied by your introduction or withdraw from the community and select another site to conduct the research.

Pick the Perfect Spot for Making Observations

Position yourself in a spot that will enhance your data collection and ability to make observations. For example, a student was intrigued by what she heard at the teachers’ lounge when she was undergoing her training to be a teacher. After extensive reading about the concerns of high school teachers, she conducted an ethnography of the teachers’ lounge at the school where she was assigned to intern for her teacher training. The result of her study was a sometimes inspiring and sometimes depressing account of ten teachers’ struggles, ideas, and ambitions.

Experts strongly disagree about how active a role researchers should play in the community that they are studying. While some ethnographers formally interview respondents, give them psychological tests, and inform community members about their role, others are less candid. Instead of revealing their status as observers, these ethnographers prefer to enter the community as silent detectives. Although this secrecy about their goals can result in an ethical quandary, some professional anthropologists prefer this approach, believing it results in better data collection. Clearly, there are dangers that participants will not forget their “company behavior” after you disclose your intentions; yet, you need to be honest about your intentions.

Develop Field Notes

Write notes in the field, seeking interpretive patterns.

While true ethnographers have the luxury of spending large chunks of time in the field and can discover their purpose after lengthy observations, you may find it necessary to focus on a more clearly defined purpose early in your research. Writing a proposal for your study and sharing it with your classmates and instructor is a good starting point. Although it is possible (although not recommended) to put off the writing until the last minute when writing a report based on library research, questionnaire, or even interviews, such a strategy is nearly impossible when writing an ethnography.

Never Stop Writing

Ethnographers are constantly writing. In the preliminary stages, they are writing about how they choose the community, synthesizing in writing the literature that exists about the community, writing detailed descriptions about what the culture and members look like, and recording dialogues and insights. Ethnographers rely extensively on their field notes to determine what attributes define members in the community, what common problems community members face, and what power relations or rituals exist. In short, ethnographers rely on their field notes to make preliminary interpretations. Rather than waiting until it’s time to leave the community, they are constantly writing up their observations and results, drawing tentative conclusions. 

Ask Journalistic Questions

By asking the journalistic questions when making field notes, you will ensure that you do not neglect any important observations.

• Who are key actors in the culture?
• What happens? What key events can you describe to give us a heightened impression about values, rituals, and problems?
• Where is the culture located? What does the environment look like?
• When did the events happen in time? Do any events or statements routinely seem to follow each other, suggesting a pattern?
• Why did the events happen?
• How did the events happen?

Select Key Informants

Wisely choose key informants and triangulate the informants’ perspectives.

When conducting an ethnography, the researcher closely observes the key informants in a particular culture because they tend to define the qualities of their group. Every culture includes leaders and followers.

When choosing key informants, you may not necessarily want to select group leaders. Other members of the community may serve as more effective key informants because they are more accessible or more willing to share information or more observant.

Triangulate Perspectives

To ensure that they are not ignoring contrary evidence and focusing only on information that confirms their preliminary hunches, ethnographers practice “triangulation,” which essentially means that they verify the authenticity of information and interpretation by checking it against other sources. If an ethnographer were studying the lives of campus police, for instance, the ethnographer would not believe one police officer’s opinions about the morale of the squad if it conflicted with the opinions of other officers.

Not only are key informants an important source of information, they also can help to make your project as accurate as possible. Ethnography often uses the technique of “triangulation” to help double check the researcher’s perspective. Triangulation is the process of having multiple perspectives involved in the composition of your project. In other words, the more viewpoints that the ethnographic researcher is able to include in his or her project, the more realistic and reliable the interpretation and thick description of the culture are likely to be.

However, triangulation does not necessarily mean that a key informant’s words are included in the final report. Triangulation can also be obtained by allowing members of the culture to read your paper in its developmental stages. Their responses allow you to revise parts of your report that may have been incomplete or misleading. Of course, you may not want the members of the culture to read what you have written, in which case you should consider other sources for triangulation. You may even ask someone who is familiar with ethnographic methods to respond to drafts of your report even if he or she has never encountered the culture that you are investigating.

Regardless of whether or not you use triangulation, or whether you use ethnographic methods at all, you should always share drafts of your writing with other people in order to help you revise your projects. The use of peer criticism is essential to all writing, regardless of its methodology or purpose.

Analyze Artifacts

Enrich your ethnographic interpretation by accounting for community artifacts..

Archeology is the study of past civilizations based upon artifacts, physical objects that are characteristic of a particular culture. We are all familiar with the Egyptian tombs and Roman ruins. These artifacts provide a great deal of information about ancient civilizations and help to recreate a picture of what life was like for these people.

Identify Artifacts Important to the Group

Anthropology also uses artifacts in order to describe a culture and its people. However, if we are researching a culture that we are able to observe, we are able not only to interpret the importance of an artifact, but also we are able to see how individuals interact with it. And so, even if you are not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, as long as you intend to study a particular culture you will want to identify objects that seem to be of daily importance to the group.

Asking the following questions can help you select which artifacts to study:

• What household or domestic objects seem necessary for the daily functioning of the culture?
• What are the religious or ritual artifacts that all of the members are likely to identify?
• How does the careful treatment of certain objects reflect the group’s value system?
• What machines or technologies seem to be changing the way the culture operates?
• What objects are frequently used for labor? for cooking? for entertainment?

Examine All Artifacts of a Culture

The most important question to ask concerning artifacts is: “What does it tell about the culture?” The ethnographer should be careful when answering this question because a culture includes a multitude of artifacts, and while you focus on the most important ones, be aware that no one single object is likely to obtain an absolutely central importance.

Below is another excerpt from Geertz’s study. Notice how the importance of cockfighting causes the Balinese men to treat their roosters with such great concern. Because they focus so much attention on these animals, it is apparent that cockfighting is very important to the culture. As you read Geertz’s description of the cocks as artifacts, ask yourself, “What do they tell us about Balinese culture?”

In the houseyard, the high-walled enclosures where people live, fighting cocks are kept in wicker cages, moved frequently about so as to maintain an optimum balance of sun and shade. They are fed a special diet, which varies according to individual theories but which is mostly maize, sifted for impurities with far more care than it is when mere humans are going to eat it and offered to the animal kernal by kernal. Red pepper is stuffed down their beaks and up their anuses to give them spirit. They are bathed in the same ceremonial preparation of tepid water, medicinal herbs, flowers, and onions in which infants are bathed, and for a prized cock just about as often. Their combs are cropped, their plumage dressed, their spurs trimmed, their legs messaged, and they are inspected for flaws with the squinted concentration of a diamond merchant. A man who has a passion for cocks, an enthusiast in the literal sense of the term, can spend most of his life with them, and even those, the overwhelming majority, whose passion though intense has not entirely run away with them can and do spend what seems not only to an outsider, but also to themselves, an inordinate amount of time with them. “I am cock crazy,” my landlord, a quite ordinary aficionado by Balinese standards, used to moan as he went to move another cage, give another a bath, or conduct another feeling. “We’re all coc k crazy.”

Observe Rituals

Enhance your ethnographic interpretation by identifying and observing customs and rituals that members of the community routinely perform.

Unlike artifacts, rituals and customs are not physical objects that can be held in one’s hands and described according to their shape and function. Rituals are activities that people perform according to a predetermined pattern. Even though rituals frequently involve the use of artifacts, the ritual itself is an activity. Because rituals and customs are behaviors, they are sometimes more difficult to describe and analyze than artifacts. However, like artifacts, rituals are very useful for understanding and interpreting a culture.

Which Rituals or Customs Should Be Studied?

Rituals are often considered a defining characteristic by both people inside as well as outside of the culture. Some of the more obvious rituals are associated with a culture’s religion. Ceremonies involving worship or celebration are easy to identify and to describe because they are usually public and are repeated with continuity and regularity. Domestic or social rituals, such as cockfighting, watching football, dining, or courtship may be harder to identify, but are also very important for understanding a group.

Ask yourself the following questions to help you select which rituals or customs to study:

• What activities do most of the members of the group participate in together?
• What behaviors seem to be common to the members of the community?
• What activities have a specific format that is repeated frequently?
• What activities involve special kinds of dress or costumes?
• What customs does the culture exhibit that are different from your own?
• What folktales, lore, or superstitions belong to the culture?
• What rituals or customs are part of the routine of daily life such as working, eating, entertainment, dating, or resting?
• What rituals or customs have been are part of the culture for a number of years? Which ones are relatively new?

Explain Why a Ritual Is Important to a Culture

As with artifacts, simply describing a ritual in detail is not enough; you must somehow tell your reader why it is important to an interpretation of the culture. Again, avoid the mistake of claiming that one particular behavior completely represents or explains an entire culture. As you already know, Geertz studied the Balinese ritual of cockfighting in great detail, recreating a vivid image of the sights and sounds of a culture obsessed by a particular form of entertainment. As you read the next excerpt, concentrate on the way cockfighting helps understand Balinese culture as a whole:

Cockfights are held in a ring about fifty-five feet square. Usually they begin toward late afternoon and run three or four hours until sunset. About nine or ten separate matches comprise a program. Each match is precisely like the others in general pattern: there is no main match, no connection between individual matches, no variation in their format, and each is arranged on a completely ad hoc basis. After a fight has ended and the emotional debris cleared away—the bets paid, the curses cursed, the carcasses possessed—seven, eight, perhaps even a dozen men slip negligently into the ring with a cock and seek to find there a logical opponent for it. This process, which rarely takes less than ten minutes, and often a good deal longer, is conducted in a very subdued, oblique, even dissembling manner. Those not immediately involved give it at best but disguised, sidelong attention; those who, embarrassingly are, attempt to pretend somehow that the whole thing is not really happening. A match made, the other hopefuls retire with the same deliberate indifference and the selected cocks have their spurs affixed—razor sharp, pointed steel swords, four our five inches long. This is a delicate job which only a small portion of men, a half-dozen or so in most villages, know how to do properly. The man who attaches the spurs also provides them, and if the rooster he assists wins its owner awards him the spur-leg of the victim. The spurs are affixed by winding a long length of string around the foot of the spur and the leg of the cock [. . .]an obsessively deliberate affair. The lore about spurs is extensive—they are sharpened only at eclipses and the dark of the moon, should be kept out of the sight of women, and so forth. And they are handled, both in use and out, with the same curious combination of fussiness and sensuality the Balinese direct toward ritual objects generally. The spurs affixed, the two cocks are placed by their handlers (who may or may not be the owners) facing one another in the center of the ring. A coconut pierced with a small hole is placed in a pail of water, in which it takes about twenty-one seconds to sink, a period known as a tjeng and marked at beginning and end by the beating of a slit gong. During these twenty-one seconds the handlers are not permitted to touch their roosters. If, as sometimes happens, the animals have not fought during this time, they are picked up, fluffed, pulled, prodded, and otherwise insulted, and put back in the center of the ring and the process begins again. Sometimes they refuse to fight at all, or one keeps running away, in which case they get imprisoned together under a wicker cage, which usually gets them e

Broaden your understanding of ethnographic research tools.

The ethnographer’s eyes and ears are two very important tools for collecting information, but documentation is key. Any instrument that can record, store, or sort information is of primary use to the ethnographer. Tape recorders, cameras, and note pads are some of the most commonly used tools for ethnographic research.Recording interviews with key informants is more preferable than taking notes; by listening to recordings over and over you will discover important details that you might otherwise miss if you simply take notes. Photographs are also very helpful when you are trying to provide your reader with a thick description of the culture. The photographs can help remind you of the details of important scenes or artifacts, or they can physically be included in the ethnography itself.

Try Counting to Identify Patterns

Some academicians accuse ethnographers of putting on airs when they incorporate statistics into their work. However, ethnographers can often produce more reliable data by incorporating a few statistical procedures. For example, an ethnographer who was studying gender relations in a college mathematics course could record the number of times males and females asked questions of the instructor. The ethnographer could also document the length of time the instructor takes to answer the questions from males and females, or could record how many times the instructor deferred the male and female students’ questions to an upcoming lecture or out-of-class meeting. After tallying these response patterns over a period of months, the ethnographer could be more confident in reporting, for instance, that females asked more questions but that the males’ questions were treated more seriously (if that is the interpretation they read).

All Data Are Important

Sometimes people misunderstand ethnography when they assume that it can only be comprised of interpretive, descriptive, or qualitative information. While it is true that ethnography makes primary use of more subjective data, that does not mean that statistical or quantitative data cannot be an important part of the study. In fact, all relevant data, regardless of its source, can potentially be included in an ethnography. Therefore, the image we would like to create of the ethnographic task of writing a report is one where the author sits amidst scores of different types of data. The ethnographer should sort through and re-examine tape recordings, photographs, journals, statistical data, or whatever she has found. The goal while writing the report is to look for patterns of behavior that define the culture. Therefore, as you consider which tools to use for collecting ethnographic data, remember that you eventually want to arrive at the point where you are searching through a variety of material you have compiled, selecting what seems most interesting and representative and discarding what appears to be less important.

Ethnographers use quantitative methods such as statistical counts. As you read the following passage, try to picture the author Geertz standing next to a cockfighting ring in Bali; imagine the tools or systems he might have used to collect his data; and notice how he incorporates statistical information into his ethnography.

. . . there are two sorts of bets or toh. There is a single axial bet in the center between the two principals (toh ketengah), and there is a cloud of peripheral ones around the ring between the members of the audience (toh kesasi). . . . The center bet is the official one, hedged in again with a webwork of rules and is made between the two cock owners, with the umpire as overseer and witness. This bet, which, as I say, is always relatively and sometimes very large, is never raised simply by the owner in whose name it is made, but by him together with four or five, sometimes seven or eight, allies—kin, village mates, neighbors, close friends. He may, if he is not especially well-to-do, not even be the major contributor, though, if only to show that he is not involved in chicanery, he must be a significant one. Of the fifty-seven matches for which I have exact and reliable data on the center bet, the range is from fifteen ringgits to five hundred, with a mean at eighty-five and with the distribution being rather noticeable trimodal: small fights (15 ringgits either side of 35) accounting for 45 per cent of the total number; medium ones (20 ringgits either side of 70) for about 20 per cent; and large (75 ringgits either side of 175) for about 20 per cent, with a few very small and very large ones out at the extremes. In a society where the normal daily wage of a manual laborer—a brickmaker, an ordinary farm worker, a market porter—was about three ringgits a day, and considering the fact that fights were held on an average of about every two-and-a-half days in the immediate area I studied, this is clearly serious gambling, even if bets are pooled rather than individual efforts.

Conclude Your Work

Understand and value the subjective nature of ethnographic interpretation..

The ethnographic research design involves a number of unique considerations toward the end of the project. Chronologically, the first of these concerns is deciding when to stop conducting field work. Logically, the more time you are able to spend in the field, the stronger your data are likely to be and therefore the stronger your understanding and interpretation of the culture.

Know When to Leave the Field

Eventually you must stop acquiring data and begin interpreting them. This does not mean that field research has to stop in order for the report to be written. In fact, sometimes ethnographers go back and forth between the writing desk and their field work. Some researchers even write their reports while still in the field. But, as someone who is likely to be new to ethnography, you should plan to essentially retire from the culture you are studying at least two weeks ahead of the date when you plan to submit your report. Even though you should be generating writing as you go, the amount of time it takes to sort your data and compose an interesting, thoughtful, and carefully composed paper is significant.

Allow for enough time to change directions in your writing or to seek some advice from your peers, informants, or instructor. You also should consider that the process of sorting through the data you have created can encroach on the time you have allowed for the actual composing of the paper.

Identify Major Interpretive Themes

Ultimately, what have you learned as a result of conducting the ethnographic research? What story can you tell that will accurately and compellingly depict the lives and struggles of community members?

When you are attempting to make sense of observations, you will need to guard against the human tendency to form patterns too quickly and then look for confirming evidence while ignoring disconfirming evidence. Of course, you ultimately cannot escape your own selective and subjective perception of reality, yet you can try to be as objective as possible by checking your version of reality against what other people in the community have to say.You can best begin analyzing and organizing your final report by rereading your chronological record of field notes. As you review, look for recurring behaviors, attitudes, and themes. For example, if you were conducting an ethnography that examines students’ attitudes regarding a large lecture course and you heard several students make similar comments—such as “I have no idea what the professor is talking about, but there’s no way I’m going to ask any questions. I don’t want to look stupid”—then you might posit a theme: Students are afraid of looking silly by asking questions in large groups. Over time, you could check the validity of this theme against what other people in the community say or suggest by their actions. In addition, other themes might emerge. For example, when you discuss the course with several students, they may tell you they have heard that the teacher has been using the same lecture notes for years and that it’s best to study the course text carefully and mostly ignore the lectures—all but the last three before each test—in order to get good grades. The ethnographer could then take these two themes and posit a pattern: Students’ drive to earn a good grade encourages them to be quiet and ignore most of the professor’s lectures.

If Ethnographies Are Completely Subjective, What’s the Use?

Virtually every nightly news program includes some coverage of the President’s daily activities. We often see him walking across the White House lawn or making a speech or shaking hands with an international figure. Often it is assumed that journalists, such as the ones who create the evening news, only report “the facts.” By appearing to only present “facts,” journalists give the impression that they are objective, that no bias affects their reporting. Of course, they are not completely objective: The decision to report some “facts” and not others involves subjective decisions. But more importantly, the audience doesn’t want only “facts”: They also want interpretation and explanation. We don’t want to watch footage of the President shaking hands and not have someone try to explain what the event might mean. We don’t want to read a story about an upcoming vote on an important bill and not also consider what the repercussions might be.

“Conclude Your Work” was written by Joseph M. Moxley

Be honest about observations.

Professional journalism has strict codes, which try to insure that their audience is not misled. Ethnographers are involved in a similar situation: they report their observations as objectively and honestly as possible, but they also explain what their discoveries might mean. In other words, ethnography inherently involves a weaving of observation and interpretation.

As with journalists, ethnographers should employ the utmost integrity in order to insure that their audience is not misled. When an ethnographer feels the need to interpret the observations he has witnessed, he wants to be sure that his interpretation is based upon as many pieces of evidence as possible. It is important to allow the ethnography to formulate such interpretations. For example, we don’t want to read a bunch of facts about the size

and frequency of Balinese cockfighting bets without also reading an analysis of what they could possibly mean.

Observation vs. Interpretation

As an ethnographer you must be aware of the distinction between observation and an interpretation. An observation is an occurrence that is witnessed by one or more people. For example, in Geertz’s article the observation is Geertz’s declaration that “this is clearly serious gambling” is an interpretation. Even though his interpretation is written emphatically, and even though we might agree with his interpretation, nonetheless, it is not something that a group of people who were watching the cockfight would agree they definitely observed.

Base Interpretations on Multiple Observations

The ethnographer’s goal is to base interpretations on as many observations as possible. Remember, ethnography is a research design that is based upon both description and interpretation. If you can make an observation that you think is important but cannot fully interpret, don’t hesitate to include it with an explanation. After all, readers will also be conducting interpretations of your study, and they can also benefit from as many observations as possible. Likewise, if you have a strong feeling about an interpretation you would like to offer, but your data may be currently incomplete, you can still include your commentary as long as you explain the situation.

In essence you should judiciously weave together both observation and interpretation, alternating them in order to create variety in your writing and maintain

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Ethnography

Essays on Ethnography

Ethnographic essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: unveiling cultural realities: an ethnographic study of [specific culture].

Thesis Statement: This ethnographic research paper provides an in-depth exploration of [specific culture], aiming to reveal the cultural practices, beliefs, social structures, and everyday life experiences of its members, while also shedding light on the impact of globalization and modernization.

• Introduction
• Research Context: Overview of [specific culture] and Its Significance
• Research Methods: Participant Observation, Interviews, and Data Collection
• Cultural Practices and Traditions: Rituals, Customs, and Social Norms
• Community and Social Structure: Family, Hierarchy, and Social Roles
• Impact of Globalization: Changes, Challenges, and Adaptations
• Conclusion: Insights Gained and the Cultural Richness of [specific culture]

Essay Title 2: Urban Ethnography: Exploring the Dynamics of [Specific Urban Community]

Thesis Statement: This ethnographic study focuses on [specific urban community], examining the urban environment, social interactions, community networks, and the challenges and opportunities that residents encounter in their daily lives.

• Research Context: Introduction to [specific urban community] and Its Demographics
• Research Methods: Immersive Fieldwork, Surveys, and Ethnographic Data
• Urban Landscape: Architecture, Public Spaces, and Neighborhood Characteristics
• Community Bonds: Social Cohesion, Networks, and Support Systems
• Challenges of Urban Life: Poverty, Gentrification, and Access to Resources
• Aspirations and Resilience: Stories of Residents and Their Urban Experience
• Conclusion: Understanding [specific urban community] and the Complex Urban Fabric

Essay Title 3: Ethnography of [Specific Subculture]: Navigating Identities, Belonging, and Expression

Thesis Statement: This ethnographic research paper explores the world of [specific subculture], shedding light on the subcultural identity, values, rituals, and modes of expression, while also examining the subculture's relationship with mainstream culture and the challenges it faces.

• Subcultural Context: Introduction to [specific subculture] and Its Significance
• Research Methods: Immersion, Interviews, and Documenting Subcultural Practices
• Subcultural Identity: Shared Beliefs, Symbols, and Modes of Expression
• Subculture vs. Mainstream Culture: Tensions, Resistance, and Integration
• Subcultural Challenges: Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Legal Issues
• Subcultural Resilience: Community Building, Artistic Expression, and Social Change
• Conclusion: Embracing the Diversity of [specific subculture] and Its Impact on Society

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Ethnography as Methods of Anthropology

Strengths and weaknesses of ethnography in relation to marxist geography, the analysis of ethnographic methods, the role of ethnography in jenkins work, autoethnography: a personal and cultural exploration, debating napoleon chagnon's ethnography: fieldwork among the yanomamo, analysis of "the white mans burden".

Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures.

Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnographers mainly use qualitative methods, though they may also employ quantitative data. The typical ethnography is a holistic study and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate, and the habitat.

Gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–43) as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated Völker-Beschreibung as a distinct area of study. This became known as "ethnography," following the introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin.

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English (EN) - Composition: Ethnographic Essay

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What is an Ethnographic Essay?

Some English instructors will assign an Ethnographic Essay for your English class. What is an Ethnographic Essay?

• It's an essay that focuses on a group, culture or subculture
• It emphasizes close observation, interview, and field notes
• Additional research may be found through library resources
• Other guidelines will be explained to you by your instructor
• Ethnographic Essay Suggestions

Reference Books on Cultures & Subcultures

• American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History by Gina Misiroglu Call Number: Reference 306.1 Am35 2009 (three volumes) Click the PDF document to see an index to this 3-volume reference set in GRCC's Reference collection. Off-campus users may request full-text articles through RaiderLoan.
• Discovering the Peoples of Michigan (series) over 50 titles - a few are in ebook format
• Guides to Subcultures and Countercultures (series) 7 titles, one in ebook format

Ethnographic Essay Databases

Be sure to take a look at the [Subject Guide] that deals with your topic more specifically.  For instance, if you're interested in writing about doctors, nurses, or other health professions, consider a Database from the [Health] , [Nursing] , or other health-related Subject Guides.

• Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Reference E-Books
• Grand Rapids Press This link opens in a new window Online access to the Grand Rapids press from 2000-current. See also MLIVE: http://www.mlive.com/
• Points of View Reference Center This link opens in a new window This is a great database to help you understand the pro's and con's of different debatable topics. It's also a handy place to see a list of really interesting topics if you need paper topic ideas and don't know where to start.
• Research Library This link opens in a new window ProQuest Research Library provides access to a wide range of popular academic subjects from business and political science to literature and psychology. The database includes more than 4,070 titles, nearly 2,800 in full text, from 1971 forward. It includes a diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers.
• SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window Mostly full-text. Comprehensive sociology research database covering the broad spectrum of sociological study, including Communication studies. The database utilizes subject headings from a built-in sociological thesaurus for better search results.

Ethnographic Essay Topics/Sample Papers

For more ideas on ethnographic essay topics, review your textbook or visit the links below.

• List of Subcultures from Wikipedia
• List of Subcultures from Your-Dictionary.com
• List of Hobbies from Discover a Hobby web page
• Pew Research Center: Reports on politics, religion, and technology trends.
• Google Trends: Highlights trends from Google search term
• Sample Papers from BHM Schools
• Last Updated: Jul 23, 2024 8:49 AM
• URL: https://subjectguides.grcc.edu/englishcomposition